“What I told him on the patio at his home is that you’re loved, we care for you, we got your back,” Barrington-Ward said. They spoke with the mother about raising Black queer children while experiencing poverty. He added, “If you saw that and you didn’t see anything wrong with that, you’re part of the problem.”īarrington-Ward said he sought to connect to the family and did so with Black trans organizer Hope Giselle from Miami. “As a Black queer man, I have experienced some of the same homophobia and some of the same abuse by the hands of people that I love as a child,” Barrington-Ward explained. He reached out to the family to offer support for the boy.
The video appears to show family members hitting the boy, and the word “gay” is seen to be cut in across the side of his head with clippers, according to WXIA.Īctivist and Atlanta city council candidate Devin Barrington-Ward told the outlet, “It popped up on my social media on Friday and when I saw it my heart was broken because I saw a piece of myself in that.”īarrington-Ward is running to represent District 9, where the incident occurred. Now the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services and the Atlanta police are investigating. A 12-year-old boy has been removed from his Atlanta-based home after his mother filmed her family abusing him and shared it on Instagram Live.